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Picasso famously transformed bicycle handles into the horns of a bull sculpture, and Marcel Duchamp infamously signed a urinal, making it a Conceptual art piece that became an immediate succès de scandale. Architects, too, have discovered found objects—usually substantial buildings like barns, firehouses, power stations, train depots—but the objet trouvé that Robert A. M. Stern recently transformed into a writers' penthouse and all-purpose retreat from his office below was a humble, metal-clad storage shed that anyone else would have called a teardown.

Stern is a busy man leading three professional lives—architect, historian and dean of Yale's architecture school—and in his practice, he found that his time and concentration were being nibbled away as associates approached him in his office asking him for "just a minute." Stern needed a quiet place for working with two writing colleagues as well as a getaway of his own.

"I wanted to create a magic relationship between inside and outside, with gigantic doors that folded open to an outside deck on the same level."

You might say that before the penthouse, Stern was already working his way up in the world. When Robert A. M. Stern Architects first moved into the building, the firm occupied only the 18th floor, and then it took over the 19th. When they were ready for the 20th floor, the highest in the building, the architects negotiated for the penthouse shed as well, which fell into their newly acquired territory—you had to go through his new floor to get to the shed on the roof. "What were my first thoughts when I saw the shed?" Stern asks himself. "I wanted it," he answers.

Stern, who prefers to explain architecture through its past, notes that the idea of a penthouse has come to signify luxurious rooftop dwelling: "But originally it meant a tool shed on the roof where the management stored paint." More recently, this metal-clad shed had been unceremoniously subdivided into a warren of rooms used for making jewelry. But beyond the crammed spaces inside and other accretions outside, the architects could see the simple, clean lines and basic elegance of a metal shell supported on thin trusses. Together with the surrounding roof, the shell offered a terrain of promise much larger than the enclosed square footage.

"My intention was to keep the character of the metal shed, the good part, while taking down the shantytown aspects," he says. "I wanted to create a magic relationship between inside and outside, with gigantic doors that folded open to an outside deck on the same level for a true continuity of space between inside and out. And I wanted to have a little fun, so that when I worked on weekends, I could weekend on 34th Street."

Stern, along with project partner Grant Marani, project architect Julie Nymann and interior designer John Boyland, stripped the interior down to the shell, which they insulated and then fitted with discreet lighting, ducts and a corrugated-metal ceiling. "We kept the metal feeling and actual trusses but stabilized the building," says Stern. The voluminous space within the shed itself became the dominant feature of the structure. They then divided the otherwise open and lofty space with an oval cubicle enclosing a bath and kitchenette/wet bar (Stern is known for his "shaken, not stirred" martinis). The north half is a writing and research room, where Stern's coauthors, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove, are surrounded by books, with office paraphernalia neatly hidden in cabinets behind a wall of gridded panels. (The writers recently finished the massive New York 2000 [see Architectural Digest, February 2007 ], and they have embarked on their next venture, a comprehensive history of planned suburbs.)

South of the cubicle lies an open living area furnished with vintage Modernist pieces, including a set of lounge chairs by Alvar Aalto and a dining table by Eero Saarinen. "I really use it for lunch when I can, and I work here at the end of lunch with my coauthors," he says.

The architects glazed the front wall with sliding doors that open onto a deck paved with squares of ipe and bordered by a stand of bamboo and hedges in square, movable tubs. Stern worked with staff landscape architect Kendra Taylor, who specified plants that could withstand the harsh winter exposure.

"My criticism of Modern architecture was its uniformity—universal space too often creates an anonymity of experience," he says. "If the penthouse is Modern in terms of style and technology, with all the fittings, it feels special rather than anonymous. It has a variety of spaces."

Stern invites clients and cultural groups to meet here, where he enjoys pointing out his favorite architectural moments in the skyline, including a soon-to-be-constructed building of his own. The floor is well above the waterline of most Manhattan rooftops, and the epiphany of this found panorama includes the broad Hudson flowing majestically into New York Harbor, where the Statue of Liberty seems to pin the vista in place.

But primarily the aerie is a place where Stern can be alone, or almost alone. "People know that if they're to come up here to the shed, it has to be a crisis. It's a great advantage to be a little hard to get to."